A Hogback and Museum Revisited: West Kirby Museum and St Bridget’s Church

Dr Ben Edwards (MMU) talking about photogrammetry in the West Kirby Museum

A Visit from Two Universities

The door to the West Kirby Museum displaying a view of Side A of the hogback stone

This week, I got an opportunity to visit St Bridget’s Church, West Kirby and the neighbouring West Kirby Museum. The small museum, open every Saturday, contains a range of artefacts revealing the medieval and modern history of West Kirby. St Bridget’s church, open most afternoons, is a lovely church, largely renovated in the 19th century, but containing a range of historic features and a large churchyard with diverse memorial types and a war memorial.

Tobias at the West Kirby Museum

Both church and museum were opened especially to accommodate a special visit from Manchester Metropolitan University’s Dr Ben Edwards and Dr Seren Griffiths who brought their MA students to undertake photogrammetric survey of the Viking hogback stone in the church and some of the medieval stones in the museum.

Heritage Together

Ben and Seren have been modelling a range of prehistoric and historic sites in North Wales and you can read about their work here and they have a website dedicated to community engagement in this process here.

Dr Patricia Murrieta-Flores and myself (both from the Dept of History and Archaeology, University of Chester) joined them (as did my son Tobias) to discuss the early medieval stone sculpture from the site.

The West Kirby Hogback

The West Kirby hogback stone is perhaps the best known of this collection, being one of only two from the Wirral, and perhaps evidence of Hiberno-Norse contacts and possibly settlement in this area (combined with place-name, historical and archaeological evidence). The monument is located in St Bridget’s church and a replica has recently been made for the Museum of Liverpool.

The hogback stone bears heavy damage on its top surface and there has been speculation that it has lost both of its ends. The decoration consists of three bands; wheel and bar ornament on side A’s top, skeuomorphic shingle-roof tegulae in the middle and plaitwork beneath.

Side B, rarely photographed, is very different and has a similar but shallower decorative arrangement. The tegulae, for example, are incised rather than carved in relief.

The ‘classic’ view of the monument: Side ASide B: showing a similar arrangement but contrasting detail and quality of execution compared to Side AView of the hogback from above, showing the extensive damage to the top-sideDetail of the end of the hogback

Perhaps the most important aspect of the visit for me was to air my views with the local people so familiar with the monument, who confirmed that they had already identified the issues I had observed regarding the monument. The input of Seren, Paty and Ben was also valuable.

Patricia and I plan to utilise the laser scans of the monument, generously provided by Liverpool Museums, to write up a new study of the West Kirby hogback stone and its hitherto under-investigated and under-theorised asymmetries and distinctive features.

Beyond the Hogback

Yet the hogback is but one of the tenth-century stones from West Kirby. Like Neston and St John’s Chester, West Kirby has a series of early medieval stone fragments, some seemingly from low wheel-crosses that may have served as high-status grave-markers. There is also one further fragment that might be part of a second hogback monument. They might be summarised with information taken from Richard Bailey’s volume IX of the Corpus of Anglo-Saxon Stone Sculpture as follows:

West Kirby 1 – cross-shaft – 10th century

West Kirby 1West Kirby 1

West Kirby 2 – fragmentary cross-head 10th century

West Kirby 2West Kirby 2

West Kirby 3 – fragmentary cross-head 10th century

West Kirby 3West Kirby 3West Kirby 3

West Kirby 5 – fragment of recumbent slab or hogback – 10th century

West Kirby 5West Kirby 5

West Kirby 6 – cross – 11th century

West Kirby 6An ‘infant’s coffin’ at West Kirby Museum

Future Directions

There remains more work to be done to characterise, interpret and communicate to the public the fascinating collection of sculpture at the West Kirby Museum and St Bridget’s church, not only the hogback, nor indeed not only the early medieval stones, but also the later medieval stonework too. For while the museum is fresh, up-to-date and the sculpture is now effectively displayed and communicated through a smart website, there remains key dimensions of this sculpture that escape attention in the current display.

These concerns chime with those of my PhD student – Joanne Kirton – who is currently writing up her doctoral thesis investigating how we can enrich our understanding of assemblages of Viking Age sculpture like that at West Kirby. Moreover, Joanne has been working with St John’s Chester to redisplay their Viking Age stones. In both regards, Joanne’s research is going to make a valuable contribution to the ongoing interpretation of the significance of these stones in the Viking Age, and their subsequent use, reuse and display today.

Ben and Seren kindly offered to share with us and the museum their photogrammetry results. Furthermore, we hope to be in discussion with them, and with our contacts and friends at West Kirby, regarding the potential of our work to enhance their appreciation and display of the monuments both at the site and online.

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Published by Prof. Howard M. R. Williams

Researcher and teacher in early medieval archaeology, contemporary archaeology, mortuary archaeology, the archaeology of memory and the history of archaeology. MA Archaeology of Death and Memory
View all posts by Prof. Howard M. R. Williams